


when all the world was made for you

by goldtreesilvertree



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - The Little Mermaid Fusion, F/F, Mermaid!Hera, Scientist!Alana
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 14:27:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10721172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldtreesilvertree/pseuds/goldtreesilvertree
Summary: It begins with a girl on the beach and a girl in the shallows, with song and stories. It ends in the darkness before the dawn, between land, sea, and sky. Mermaids seldom receive happy endings...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For the amazing [mothwrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mothwrites/pseuds/mothwrites).

It begins with a girl on the rocky beach, stood straight as an arrow against the lashing of wind and wave, dark hair whipping about her face. She should be hurrying home, she can taste the storm on the wind, but Alana Maxwell has never been inclined to bend to any storm. Besides, she is waiting for something. First contact wasn’t going to wait because of a little rain. The waters rush and surge closer to her feet, but she does not move.

Another girl – or something like a girl - waits in the shallows, lying on her stomach. Her hair, the exact colour of seafoam, floats amid the white-tipped waves, perfectly camouflaging her from the woman on the beach. She should be leaving too, for deeper water where the waves will not touch her. But then Alana begins to sing, her faint human voice almost snatched away by the wind. And Hera rises from the waves as if summoned, weaving her voice with Alana's, replying to her in the rich, multi-tonal music that is a mermaid’s speech.

Alana steps forward too quickly, holding out her hands, but Hera has already dissolved back into the waves, as though she had never been there. Alana might have concluded she'd imagined the mermaid, summoned her from sea and storm and her own imagination, but the recorder burns in her pocket all the way home, and, once she has neutralised the noise of sea and wind, she can hear the faint sound of the mermaid's song entwined with her own. The sound settles like a glow under her skin. It is enough to begin.

* * *

The second time, the breeze is playful, tugging at the edges of Alana’s scarf and forcing her to cling to it as well as her laptop. Carefully, she sets the laptop atop a large, flat rock, and sets it to play an audio file of her own singing, layered. Then she sits down on the stones, wraps her arms around her legs, and waits.  
There is a quiet noise from the shallows, almost like a gurgle of water. Hera knows what the human is trying to say, should even be impressed by it (in spite of the absence of the locative and recognative tones her human ears couldn’t process) but to hear her own glitches replicated by the human's sweet, ethereal voice seemed entirely wrong. The girl's Singing should be perfect as Hera's will never be.

So distracted is she by the perfect replication of her own flawed voice, Hera does not notice when the tide draws away from her, leaving her suddenly exposed between sea and shore, stranded on her stomach, away from the comforting pressure of the water. She knows she is not a fish, that she can still breathe, but, least of her mother’s daughters, breathing with lungs instead of gills seems as impossible as Singing without a stutter. This is how she is going to die, thrashing helplessly rolled onto her back against the stones of the beach... And then a shadow comes between her and the sun, and she realises the human is standing above her with an expression of... Concern?

“C-can you breathe?” she stutters, in clumsy Song. Hera has not spoken to a human in so long, it is a struggle to remember to nod her head. The human frowns, kneels beside her, gently props her up with warm hands on her wet back, and slowly, the knack of breathing returns to Hera.

“H-hello?” the human tries, when her breathing has slowed.

“Hello,” Hera’s English is rusty, and the human girl nearly drops her in surprise.

“You can speak?”

Alana should have anticipated that an intelligent, long-lived species might have made contact with humans before, but to hear the mermaid reply to her in English was astonishing.

“You can understand me?” She switched to English.

“A little. Your accent is as funny now as it is in Song.”

The mermaid seems surprisingly small out of the water, her features delicate and fragile among her mass of pale... Hair? Whiskers? Some kind of antennae? She would need a sample to test and she wasn’t sure if cutting it would hurt her. She seemed to be breathing air now – so some of the stories of amphibious mermaids had truth behind them - but Alana doesn’t know how long she could survive out of the water. It might be to her credit to bring the university a specimen for dissection, but that hardly counted towards her aims for first contact.

“Do you need me to help you back to the sea?” she asks. She doesn’t know if she’d be strong enough to carry rather than drag the mermaid back to the water, and she’s relieved when the mermaid glances about then shakes her head.

“There’s n-nobody here but the two of us?” Alana nods. This beach is too awkward to reach to be popular with tourists and dogwalkers. “Then I can stay a little while. You’re A-alana?”

“Alana, yes. What should I call you?”

“Hera.”

* * *

Alana records her conversations with Hera meticulously, but she doesn’t speak a word of her discovery to either of her supervisors. She barely trusts Doctor Kepler, and will never trust Cutter enough to give him a share in her discovery. She doesn’t even tell Jacobi, her best (only) friend, even though his work in chemistry has no relevance to her own xenobiology. Hera is her secret, her muse, and (though Kepler would threaten her scholarship if he knew) she can’t help but feel something towards her subject. Hera is amazing, her language has words that express concepts Alana can’t truly picture, she can control the sea as if it were a muscle of her own body, and for some reason she’s happy to spend her mornings being interviewed by a PhD student. She would be a miracle, if Alana believed in miracles, a blessing if she believed in blessings. If Alana was truly honest with herself, she would almost call her a friend.

Hera first returns because she enjoys exchanging information about herself – harmless things about Song, her gills, living underwater – in return for details about how the human world has changed. But as Alana begins to speak more of her friends, of the town, of her life in the “universe city”, she cannot be satisfied by Alana’s stories alone. And her curiosity leads to her first mistake: she shows Alana her shape-shifting in return for the promise of human clothes, and a lift into town.

This should not be possible, but Alana cannot deny the testimony of her eyes: Hera looks almost human. No animal should be able to transform like that, but Alana is quickly learning that mermaids do not obey some of the laws of biology she once thought unbreakable. Besides, the temptation of walking into town with her mermaid at her side unnoticed is too tempting to resist, and she jumps on Hera's offer. It is easier than she thought to disguise her in jeans and a hoodie, with a cane to conceal the fact that sometimes her legs forget how to walk. If her English is flawed, she could easily pass as a foreign student, though Alana’s grateful they never run into Jacobi or Kepler in town, either of whom know Alana and her research well enough to call her out on her new “friend”. They wander round town together, Alana playing tour guide, as they try coffee (which Hera hates but Alana couldn’t live without) and fish and chips (which apparently haven’t changed since the last time Hera was on the surface, and are still, in her words, “p-perfect). These outings slip into an almost mundane routine, sliding loose from their role as momentous interspecies contact, into friendly outings which Alana emphatically does not call “dates”.

Hera does call them dates, at first by mistake (it’s hard to keep track of what words mean in a language where connotations don’t even vary by tone), but later deliberately. The land is still a marvellous place, but it seems so much more when she sees it at Alana’s side. It could be because of how much has changed since she was last on land, of course, but there are moments when she knows it’s something in Alana’s smile, in the tilt of her head as she listens, in the clumsy sweetness of her attempts to reproduce Song without her laptop, that makes her long for the ground beneath her feet. Hera has lived in the ocean for longer than she can tell, but it has never seemed so large or so lonely until now.

Alana is not the only friend Hera makes on land. She meets Eiffel and Minkowski at the fish and chip shop, when Alana tries to hurry her out without them seeing her. They notice – they aren’t stupid, whatever Alana seems to think of them both – and while Minkowski is stiff and awkward around Alana, who she calls Maxwell, she can’t imagine Eiffel (Doug) as stiff around anyone, though Alana clearly wants to get away from them both.

(Later, when she’d learned more about him, she’d suspect that he had waylaid them purely to make Alana squirm, but by then, she can hardly hold that against him.)

  
Meeting other humans is lovely, but also serves to cement her growing realisation that how she feels about Alana is different. She might be happy to see Doug, or even Minkowski (especially if the beautiful girl who makes her blush is around), but none of them make her breath catch the way Alana does. It’s a new game, pretending she isn’t pretending to be human, one which would terrify her as much as it excites her without Alana by her side. But Alana is almost always at her side now, to remind her lungs how to breathe air, her legs how to walk. When the vast emptiness of the sky threatens to overwhelm her, it’s Alana who pulls her back to the earth, grounds her. It would be so easy, Hera thinks, to slip into this human skin again…

It would be so easy, Alana thinks, to forget Hera’s inevitable role in her major scientific discovery, to treat her like a friend rather than a source. It becomes even harder to resist when she has to actively avoid Minkowski and Eiffel, curious as always about everything that doesn’t concern them, and she moves her meetings with Hera to her bedroom in her crappy student flat, where they exchange stories of their different worlds over trays of sushi and bowls of popcorn, where Hera’s hair flows over Alana’s pillows as though it belongs there.

(She still hasn’t worked out the evolutionary purpose of that hair. She will not admit that it might be because its beauty fascinates her too much to risk damaging it. She will not admit that the same feeling applies to many facets of her relationship with her mermaid.)

It’s in this room that Hera makes her second mistake, while she and Alana sit pressed so close on the narrow bed that she can forget that species or bodies divide them. She can forget she was ever lonely, and so she tells Alana a secret better kept.

She pulls the comb out of her hair. “You wanted to know how my tail transforms? Without this, I’m as trapped in one form as you are.”

Alana traces the sharp bone edges of the comb, which looks like a removable part of Hera’s skull. It’s beautiful, in a sharp-edged organic way, but there is nothing about it which should give it the special qualities Hera assigns it. There is nothing in the world like Hera, she’s starting to suspect.

“Why would this help you transform?”

Hera shrugs, tucking the comb back into her hair, “It’s how it works. Don’t you listen to the old stories?” She smiles confidingly, drawing her head closer to Alana’s, “If you steal a mermaid’s comb, she’s yours forever.”

Alana doesn’t entirely believe it, but watches to see how the comb slots into her head regardless. Useful information should never be completely discarded.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s months before Alana thinks of the comb again, when the golden summer she’s spent with Hera begins to fade, when she realises her subject (companion) has started to look longingly to the south. Mermaids migrate, Hera explains, when the waters get cold, and Alana feels a cold hand clench around her heart.

It would be a prettier story if Alana could tell herself she took the comb for love, or for friendship, for any reason which related to _Hera_ rather than what Hera is. But she is a scientist, not a storyteller, and she takes the comb for science. Science is cold comfort when Hera looks at her with a blank hatred in her eyes, even as she plays the delighted houseguest. She did not truly realise the terms of _yours forever_ would be so bleak, but she comforts herself by insisting that, as soon as news of her discovery breaks, she’ll return the comb to Hera. Of course she will. She’s not a _monster._ She’s a scientist.

Alana’s _science_ is something Hera will never understand. Her face lit up like the stars when she spoke about it, but there is nothing good in the world which could lead to _this._ But as long as Alana holds her comb, Hera cannot say a word that her _mistress_ wouldn’t like, so she says very little. Trapped in an empty flat, trapped under an empty sky, trapped in a body not her own, all seem pretty much the same to Hera, so she spends most of her days at first wandering round the flat, picking through Alana’s things, hopelessly looking for her comb. It’s no good, Alana isn’t stupid, and the comb is likely long gone somewhere Hera could never retrieve it. But if she’s determined to keep Hera a prisoner on land, Alana sees no point in keeping her a prisoner in the house, and so she’s allowed to wander the town freely, during the day, at least. It makes a cruel kind of sense. Where would Hera go even if she did leave the town? She has no real money, aside from what Alana gives her, no real friends aside from those Alana already knows.

 In a fit of desperation, she walks in ill-fitting shoes back down to the beach, sinks her bloodied feet into the sea, and calls upon her mother.

  _Hera_. The waves sigh with her mother’s voice, and she is, as usual, disappointed. _A human, again? You know what they are_.

 “I know!” Hera pleads, the wind throwing her words back to her, “But she betrayed me! Please let me c-come back! Please let me come _h-home!”_

 Her mother hums in the rushing of the waves, a sound indistinguishable from the water’s roar to human ears. _Let me think… Without your comb, you have no place among my daughters, but perhaps you can prove your worth again…_

 Hera hears her own voice break, “Tell me! I’ll do an-nything!”

 There is a low chuckle, like clashing stones, “That girl, the human you liked so much… bring me her heart, and you shall have your place in the sea again.”

Hera feels her mother’s presence fade like an outgoing tide, a current that she longs for but cannot follow. She falls to her knees, shaking and breathless in the saltwater waves, but neither her gills nor her lungs allow her to regain her breath. When she finally returns to the flat, Alana does not comment on her salt-stained jeans, but helps her bandage her feet. Hera wants to scream at her, shake her, kiss her. Hera does none of these things, but curls onto her side of the bed and does not sleep. 

Alana knows she should feel guilty for the comb hidden in her lab, but her research pours out in pages now she has a sample to analyse. Sometimes, she can pretend they’ve achieved a perfect domestic balance. She brings Hera trays of sushi and new teas, combs out her hair for her, holds her when the open sky and lack of pressure overwhelm her. The flat seems bigger for someone to share it with, her research more fascinating with someone who truly understands it, and it’s far easier to believe in herself when Hera fills her every waking moment at home. She could almost make herself believe they’re happy together, she and her mermaid, if she never looked into Hera’s eyes and saw a monster reflected there. Yes, it should make her feel guilty, and Alana wonders if there’s something broken in her that she thinks her cause is worth this terrible cost. If Hera wants to make her a monster, then let them be monsters together, made for each other, the mad scientist and the mermaid.

Every night, after Alana goes to sleep, Hera slips out of bed, down to the kitchen, and takes out a knife. Alana doesn’t keep the comb on her when she sleeps, there’s nothing that could stop Hera slicing down through her chest, breaking open the delicate cage of her ribs, ripping out her heart to see if it’s truly rotting already. And every night, she sets the knife down, slowly and deliberately, giving herself excuse after excuse to leave Alana alive. She should die, but the moonlight lit her skin to silver, her freckles to stars. She should die, but no human has come as close to mastering Song as her. She should die, but Hera cannot – _will not_ – kill her. That does not mean she can keep living this way.

 

* * *

 

It ends with a girl on the jetty, too-thin legs hanging over the edge. The water’s deep here, and if her mother will not take her back living, she cannot refuse her in death. But Hera was not brave enough to drive the knife through Alana’s heart and live, and she wonders if she will be brave enough to slip into the water without a struggle. In this moment, she sits suspended between sea and sky, in the grey light before dawn.

The jetty creaks behind her, and she starts, almost falling into the water before a firm hand grasps her shoulder. It’s Eiffel, as she should have expected. She knows he’s been worrying about her since she started spending all her time in the town, but she hadn’t expected him to notice her early morning walk. He sits down beside her, and begins to talk without looking at her.

“You know, I heard a story once I think you’d like. It’s this classic tale of girl meets boy – or fish-girl meets human boy – but the important thing is, she falls in love with him and gives up her voice and living forever to get a chance at this boy…” Hera tries to interrupt, to ask why any of this matters, but he shushes her, “…I don’t know why, but she apparently likes him that much. But even though she’s given up her home and her voice and her life for him, he still doesn’t want her. In fact, he wants to marry someone else, and leaves our girl high and dry.”

“So what happens to her?”

“In the original story?” he shrugged, “Kate told me she dies, but I never liked that ending. Girl had the entire world to explore, and decided to turn into seafoam just because someone didn’t like her back? That’s ridiculous!” Hera hums, trying to keep breathing. “Nobody should need to die because they love someone they shouldn’t.” He still doesn’t look at her, but he takes her hand and squeezes it gently. 

“But what if your only choices are love and death?” Hera asks, more to herself than to him. 

“That’s bull, Hera. There are always more than two choices. You and Minkowski and Lovelace might love all these doomsday, life-or-death choices, but the real world isn’t like that. There are more options than love and death.”

 “And what if I can’t see them? What if I’m not _g-good_ enough to see them?”

 He squeezes her hand again. “You’re one of the smartest people I know. Together, we’ll work it out.”

 Hera wishes she could cry, but mermaids cannot shed tears. Instead, she holds her knees in to her chest in a tight ball and tries to remember how to breathe air. He wraps an arm around  her shoulders and lets her relearn breathing on her own.

 It begins again with a boy and a girl on a jetty, watching the sun rise over the horizon. She is not better or free just yet, but she’s going to be. For now, that is enough.


End file.
